*preroll music*
Herald: And welcome to this beautiful evening
The next talk is very interesting talk.
It's actually.. will go to.. tackle some more..
quality.. quantity, the army.
Actually using an army to have some balance
in a way.
Not...
Yeah, I can actually just say: What can an army do if the army
was effectively (?) put into action, let's say.
So.
Mr. Constant Dullaart will introduce the talk for us today.
And please welcome him with a warm applause.
*applause*
constantdull: First of all, thank you very much for joining.
It's a great privilege
and an honour to speak in this context of the great CCC.
I'm generally more nervous than I would normally be.
So, anyway, forgive me if I stutter or something, but hopefully I'm not,
because I drank some beer.
So, also.. so, I built an army.
This much is true.
And it's nice because we're talking about Crypto Wars and about losing the war,
and we're talking about all those other kinds of stuff.
We have all these war analogies, so I thought it's also kind of fitting
to present an army to you.
But I will actually explain to you
how I got there.
So some people might know me from works like these,
which is.. which doesn't have sound.
Ahm.. *laughing*
I think it did originally.
But anyway, this is the Revolving Internet.
I made it in 2010.
So, making jokes of pre-existing web content, which is a company called Google,
that a lot of people seem to keep talking about.
I twisted it around.
So I made the internet revolve,
just like the world rotates, I guess.
And then I made this other thing, which is called the death of the URL,
because the URLs died, and this is one of the first things
where it's actually a XXX domain name, which was the first attempt to organize
all the URLs so it would be easier to block on porn content.
But then I just.. yeah, you see what happens, you know, that's happening.
So I basically changed the title.
Normally the referrer is..
The referrer is actually in the title bar as a URL, but now
the title is actually in the page, and ah.. yeah, you get it.
Yeah, so that's.. or I would like an encrypted treasure map
and this treasure map is actually weirdly enough sold
for like a lot of money in New York in an auction house just because
it points to another treasure island, where the fictive or maybe real treasure
of Lima is buried and now there is an actual exhibition buried.
But.. and also I started a company recently, DullTech,
because I want technology to be more dull.
*laughing*
Because I think technology is perceived to be exciting while it's not,
so it should just be dull as fuck as it is.
Yeah.
So..
This is actually a..
I also retrieved the very first image that was ever photoshopped,
which I was quite happy about finding.
And then I decided to write an.. oh, actually I didn't put a timer.
So anyway, I'll see notes.. ahm.
So this is..
I wrote a letter to her, to the protagonist in this picture, Jennifer,
and I'll read you the letter right now.
Dear Jennifer, sometime in 1988, through a sitting-in on the beach
in Bora-Bora looking at to Opua island, enjoying your holiday
with a very serious boyfriend.
The serious boyfriend, John,
took a photograph of you sitting on the beach not wearing your bikini top.
John later became your husband and father to your children
Sara, Lisa, Alex and Jane.
John, if you're watching this, hi.
This photograph of a beautiful moment in your personal history
has also become a part of my history and that of many other people.
It has even shaped our outlooks on the world at large.
John's image of you became the very first photograph to be publicly altered
by the most influential image manipulation program ever.
Of course, this is why I know the names of your children and this is also
why I know you're trying to do cool things trying to get a .green toplevel domain name.
Anyway, personally I believe that the importance of the domain name has been reduced
to a nostalgic poetic value, but that doesn't matter now.
I still wonder if you felt the world changed there on that beach,
the fact that reality would be more moldable, that normal people could change their history,
brighten up their past and put twirl effects on their faces.
That holiday image became the very first photograph publicly manipulated
in Photoshop, and your intimate beach moment
became the reality for several potential clients to play with.
2 Jennifers, no Jennifer, less clouds etc.
And in essence it was the very first Photoshop meme.
But now the image is nowhere to be found online.
Did John ask you if he could use this particular image?
Did you enjoy seeing yourself on a screen as much as he did?
Did you ever think you would be the muse that would inspire so much contemporary
image making?
Did you ever print out the image yourself?
Would you be willing to share the image with me, and, if so,
with the other people to whom it took on such an unexpected significance?
Shouldn't the Smithsonian or any other large institution have the negative
of that image, not to mention digital backups of its endless variations?
All these questions have made me decide to redistribute the image, 'Jennifer in Paradise',
as well as I can, somewhat as an artist, somewhat as a digital archaeologist,
restoring what few traces of it I could find,
restoring the image from what was available to everyone in the somewhat public space
of the internet.
It was sad to realize this blurry screengrab was the closest I could get to the image,
but beautiful at the same time.
How often do you find an important image that is not online
in several different sizes already?
This beautiful artifact of software development
has become an artwork in this way, in which you, or at least your depiction
play a central part in a body of work that has become very dear to me,
a faint blurry pixelated focal point,
a work that celebrates a time when you were young and the world was young
as it still naively believed in the authenticity of the photograph.
Sometimes, when I'm anxious about the future of our surveilled
computer-mediated world,
when I worry about cultural imperialism and the politics behind software design,
I imagine myself travelling back in time, just like the Terminator,
to that important moment in technological world history,
there on that beach in Bora-Bora, and just sit there with you,
watching the tide roll away.
Sincerly, Constant Dullaart.
So, Jennifer never responded.
Thank you.
*laughing**applause*
So, Jennifer never responded, but the cool thing was..
So this was basically an anecdote in Adobe's history, right,
so there was some talk about this picture, but I couldn't find it online,
and it was in a video which I'll briefly show later.
So, I restored it and I redistributed it with this letter as an open letter.
But of course I'm..
I put a payload in the jpg.
I stuck in and graphically encrypted some messages in different versions
of this jpg because I also wanted to discuss that a jpg, of course,
isn't only a way to distribute images, but it's also the container
of the jpg, and especially if you stuck in a graphically.. inject content,
it actually becomes a unique container discussing the thereoality (?) of
digital photography besides, like..
I mean, a lot of me.. as an artist,
like I still have to do with a lot of people discussing paper and discussing prints,
and like discussing the value of a file, if you can copy it and this kind of bullshit,
and in the end, I needed to emphasize the fact that like, this image also wasn't
mine,
I just redistributed it.
So actually, the only thing that's for sale as an artwork, as this, is the password
to actually access the content I injected into it.
And then of course you get these questions of institutions, like, how do we show this
in a space?
So this is, like, working predominantly online,
this is the question I get most of the time.
Constant, how do we show this in your exhibition?
So.. mostly I just take really stupid analogies, and they work.
So, here of course I used UV paint, and I just, ah, the text,
which is.. well.. maybe it's an image, but the text that was encrypted
in that Jennifer in Paradise image is now painted with UV paint on there,
and I would read it as a performance.
And then, of course, because I wanted to sell the passwords,
I wanted the access to be the commodity, right, so if you're.. like,
within art you're always thinking about a commodity, people wanna own something,
they wanna have a cultural gesture, which they can..
yeah, which they can own, basically.
And then, as an artist you're entitled to do dramatic gestures.
Or at least, I feel like I was entitled to do dramatic gestures.
*laughing*
And to close down the access to the encrypted contents
I had to destroy.. *laughing*
.. anyway, I don't advise you doing that at home
because apparently it's poisonous or whatever..
*laughing**applause*
So this basically meant that the people.. *shouting from the audience*, *laughs*
so this basically meant that the people that wanted access to that content
needed to, or buy new UV lights, or they needed to buy the password to the file.
The cool thing is that John, after a while, did respond,
because it was.. the Wall Street Journal started to write about it,
and the Wall Street Journal he did find worthy to reply, not my, of course,
my skanky little emails writing the big developer.
But anyway, he did reply, and he was actually super-generous,
and he was actually.. he was saying like, you should have asked me,
but he gave a lot of info, like on which scanner he scanned
that first image on, and like he went to.. app,
but he also said, like, that he distributed it
to other people under a strict non-disclosure agreement,
which I'll prove to you later that it's.. that that's.. not true.
Anyway, but..
I pointed out what is funny, which is.. it says it's one of the first images
to be photoshopped.
I guess that is a word now.
So, I'm really happy that I actually have an email to prove the moment
when the guy that made up 'photoshop' figures out that 'photoshopping'
had become a verb.
*laughing*
Anyway.. and also, like, he used a 24-bits colour image.
So, I don't know, any of you ever using 24-bits colour images?
I don't, but.. maybe you do.
But the cool thing also that he needed to transport the image
on separate floppy disks to save the red, green and blue channels,
which I also thought was quite remarkable.
Anyway, of course.. like, this image is really important because it was
one of the first digital images at that time for people to use
manipulating in Photoshop, because it's 1988,
so there's no web, there's no digital images distribution
or wide availability of it, no digital cameras,
so they needed to find that as a source.
So this is the demo,actually, where I got it from.
John: So I start with it and open up.. constantdull: This is John
John: an image of .. This is a tourist picture I took of my wife when we were on a vacation
in Tahiti.
This is from Bora-Bora.
I used this image for doing a lot of the demonstrations
including the first demonstrations that I did at Adobe Systems.
So I have opened a 24-bit image.
We're looking at it on an 8-bit display,
but you can still manipulate the 24-bit image.
So I'm gonna start by cloning Jennifer, so I'm gonna start by just...
constantdull: Okay, I'm just gonna mute John out for a bit,
because it's super interesting, but you can watch the video later.
The thing is that of course he's cloning his wife,
he asked her to marry her the very next day after this picture.
I'm just saying he's confirming a very age-old cultural stigma
of a man objectifying the female body,
and I thought that this was really.. *laughing*
.. I mean the fact that he is cloning his wife, and showing that
as a tool to his potential customers.. *laughing*
..seriously, what the fuck, why didn't he use a bike,
or a turtle or something.
*laughing*
John: Copy.. paste.
*applause*
John: And now I have a clone.
constantdull: Anyway, so..
I've been using that image now because I felt
like I'd made, you know, a new perception of that copy,
and I've been using that into different works
where I'm just rotating it through all the different photoshop filters
that are available.
So you get these kind of images, and you get like these.. little presentations
where I like liquefy Jennifer all over the place,
like LitraAlt ? You know, and there's all these
like, images, because of course I'm turning this image into
a ubiquitous kind of image that's everywhere.
So I want to take it out of the idea that it's not visible everywhere.
But the cool thing is that finally then John actually responded again,
and that was in the Guardian, and the cool thing is
that, where before it was under a so-called non-disclosure agreement,
which actually my lawyer told me that it's an implicit license he gave
because he gave it to other people.
Anyway, but the cool thing is that he gave actually the real image
to the Guardian.
So now everybody has access
to that first actual image.
So I found like I still pride myself
in kind of tricking him into releasing that first image,
where it was first like a personal image,
and now actually justified to him that the world had
a right to see that very first image and to read that very first image
as an important image in photographic world history.
So I'm kinda happy that this is now available for everyone
to fuck with.
So, this is Jennifer now, or about 3 years ago.
She's.. yeah.
This is her.
I don't have anything to say about this.
*laughing*
And also the nice thing is.. nonono, also, I did want to like ask them..
augh, 15 minutes, thank you.
I also wanted to.. this means I have to hurry up.
I actually wanted to take them back to Bora-Bora on like a holiday
and retake that picture, right, so.. and then they perceived it
weirdly enough as an indecent proposal.
They said, like, oh, nonono, that's not ok.
And then I thought, like, maybe they are prudes because she's like
half naked in the picture and she thought I would wanna see her naked again,
which I never.. like, I thought of later.
Anyway, but now, if you google her, you get like the first response are..
like, the first result is my letter to her, which is still very nice,
so I hope she read it by now.
*laughing*
But to be honest I only conversed with her husband
and she never replied which I also think is a bit weird.
Yeah, so.. *laughing* that.
As an artist, I think I'm in the business of turning this into like a more
intricate version of this and then calling it art.
So, I was invited to do an exhibition about clowns
and I gave this press image, and this is actually a..
an artist, Marina Abramovic, that maybe somebody would know,
and it's Klaus Biesenbach, who is like some kind of curator.
And here is them with more curators.
And here is Ai Weiwei with naked children, which is awkward.
Now, it's not.. it's not.. it's a joke, it's a joke, sorry.
So.. ok, I just have to catch my breath.
So, this is weird, right, like now on Instagram,
like, Instagram is actually starting to influence
how the artworld works.
So you would see an artist, you'd see the amount of followers.
This is a collector, for example, and you would see or be
the circle of relevance (?). Like, if they have a certain amounts
of followers, you would think, like, ok, that kind of quantitative validation,
or like, this quantified social validation might suggest the kind of access
to like a social capital, s that they're more
relevant as a collector or as an artist.
And like you'd get these collectors that are posing in front of their artworks
to generate more relevance for their artworks.
And in the end I was thinking, if that relevance actually starts ..
if that social capital, that quantification of social capital actually starts
to represent actual capital, like in the art world,
but in a lot of other places, then why not buy that capital.
And of course like, if you just do a simple search online
you can buy Facebook followers, Instagram followers, everywhere.
So... and then, I started to research these followers,
and these followers were all automated, right, like, this was their content,
this were the pictures they're posting.
So you would get these like kinda automated pictures where it says..
this has the hashtag 'instadroid', but weirdly cropped-off heads
in the image.
This also.. reminiscence with weirdly cropped-off heads
in the image.
And of course, this means it's just an automatically cropped image
because of the at that time dominant-square format of instagram pictures.
So, the tag is 'relax' with another few heads missing.
'Marathon'..
I never knew you could do a marathon with a snowboard,
but, whatever.
So.. *laughing* this is all, like, generated, right,
and then you even have the bios, the bios are ripped from other people
and then manipulated.
So maybe a lot of you people would know this already,
but I thought it was really, like, genuinely awesome poetry,
or found poetry, where.. this is Jonalan, and Jonalan says
":) I'll prove to the world that I would ecome somehin imporant to they ned someday."
So I think thats.. and Darsed says "I love so much asteniber."
*laughing*
And.. anyway, I'll skip this, or.. "simple n pretty n paid"
This is also weird.
Gondar is "mchanical engineer 29 years old, raduated
from ITM in 2007"
I think the original bio reads MIT, but I'm not sure.
And this is one of my favourites, where it says:
"Myna isRoxi, I like it be fancy."
*laughing*
"phot, vieo hort poems blogger, web edditing"
Anyway, so this is another artist, maybe you know him, Jeff Koons,
he was also fresh on Instagram, and you know what I did,
I thought like if I can buy these followers, you know, if I can find Jeff Koons,
why not actually inject some capital into these people and inject
some social capital, and I decided to buy 2.5 million instagram followers.
*laughing*
Because I had a budget from some institution and I donated these.. *laughing*
I donated these followers to all these artists, right,
because if these artists wanna kind of compare length of their dicks,
to like follower numbers, then why not make them all as equal?
*laughing* So.. *applause*
Thank you.
So Jeff Koons had 100,000 followers.
Jerry Saltz who is a critic also got 100,000 followers.
Klaus Biesenbach got 100,000 followers.
Richard Prince got 100,000 followers.
This Murakami got 100,000 followers.
Jonas Lund, a friend of mine, got 100,000 followers.
All these people got 100,000 followers exactly, so they were equal to each other.
*laughingwhoopingclapping*
So basically I became the Lenin of social media, right?
*laughing*
Injecting capital making people equal is what I do.
So.. this is.. but the weird thing was that the New York Times called me
and I'm like, holy fuck, NYT is calling me, it's on the phone, on this shitty little
freephone, or fairphone, like on.. audience: Yeah!
Heh, exactly, fairphone.. *laughing* there's the New York Times, right.
So I'm thinking, this is relevant.
And she keeps asking me
- I'm hurrying up -, like, she's asking me, like, yeah, but like,
do you know other people that are selling artworks for Instagram,
and like, did you make money for Instagram, and I'm like,
that's.. like, what I'm criticizing, like, this is not what the work is about, like,
I'm not actually telling you like maybe somebody won't spot
a work of mine through Instagram, but that's, like, I'm saying, like this..
validation system of you thinking an artwork is important is corrupt.
It's vulnerable.
It's a system that's fucked, and it's a commercial system
that we're buying into and you shouldn't believe it.
So the funny thing was that in this article she quoted Simon de Pury
as an auctioneer and she quoted his follower number to mention
how important he was.
*laughing*
But I bought that guy..
I bought that motherfucker, like, how many followers?
*laughing* 25,000 followers, so why the fuck
did the New York Times quote, you know, that actual number to inject..
like, to mention some kind of relevance for that auctioneer.
The same with Ai Weiwei, they also quoted like how many followers they had,
like, I own these followers.
*laughing*
Anyway, so we're in a world.. we're in a world that these kind of images,
this is the most-liked image, that this is gonna be our culture.
That this is gonna be the most relevant image, because this is the most liked.
And that's a shitty place to be.
You know.
We need to have
other tools to talk about the value of images, to talk about our culture,
and not get trapped into these stigmas.
So as an artist we need other tools to just make, you know, reversed thumbs,
we need another way to reflect on that landscape.
So then you have..
I'm not gonna explain technically, but you..
*laughing*
So, Friend Bomber, Mass Planner, all these little things, and I got information
because I was asked for the..
I was asked for Schirn, Kunsthalle Frankfurt,
to do another project, and they gave me some money, and Schirn Frankfurt
is based in Hessen.
And Hessen delivered the soldiers to fight the first American revolution.
So I thought it would be more than fitting to bring them back to life
and fight this American revolution.
So I took all the names from
the actual Hessian soldiers that fought in the United States, were paid by the British,
and actually with that money the very first contemporary art museum was funded,
the Fridericianum.
Anyway, 1780, all these names I got through
the wonderful Landesgeschichte information system, but also the professor
that helped me.
So, these are all the accounts that I made active.
*laughing*
But the weird thing was that all these accounts, like, a lot of these were created in Pakistan,
also, they were actually manually crafted, also, I had like automated ones,
but also tried.. this guy.. have manually crafted ones.
And then these pictures showed up, and I actually had to explain them,
like, the Hessian soldiers were white, and like I shouldn't have like non-white.
like, passport pictures on there.
And then, when.. but then actually,
when I was typing this in Skype, weirdly enough all these people
use Skype, which I thought was very weird, knowing what we know,
but anyway, it felt so weird to ask that and say, like, could you please
use white images, that I'd stopped asking that.
So, if somebody talks to me about, like, the conceptual error,
why the artificial army isn't all white, it's because I don't give a fuck anymore,
and I don't wanna ask somebody in Pakistan to only use white images, cause it's fucked.
*applause*
Anyway, so of course because it's.. thank you.
Because it's also of course like, it's very weird that we're using this
kind of like system where it's like... a lot of this kind of artificial capital,
of this artificial social capital is crafted in lower wage countries,
and we're actually supporting a system by buying these followers
and buying this kind of black hat SEO shit, with like having a very large groups of people
crafting this kind of.. these kind of accounts, and.. anyway, I think there's ..
a kind of messy thing, but the nice thing about like using army as an analogy
is that it brought me onto BBC News.
And this is also really funny, because I think this is again
like the value of..
I could've said, like, I make a..
like a large collection of phone verified accounts,
but I think by saying I made a fake army, or I made an army,
got me on the news and then the funny thing is that actually
although it's been on the news and in the Guardian again,
the nice thing is over half of the army is still alive.
So they're still out there, I'm still distributing likes,
I'm still using that.
If you would want to help me,
please give me.. if you have like spare Facebook accounts,
which I hope you don't, if you do, fuck Facebook,
get the fuck out of there, but also, if you do have them,
give them to me and please accept the friends of like another 1000 soldiers
and the next few thousand soldiers that I'm gonna make,
and let's create some social noise.
Let's create some social noise of like.. and fight this kind of
weird artificial system of like quality validation through..
through this kind of artificial social measurement system.
So yeah, like.. fuck Facebook.
Anyway, I'll just play with a short piece of.. is that a zero or do I have like
a few more minutes left?
Ok.
So I'll play a short.. a brief part
of my video would like.. my call to war, let's say.
*phone ringing* This is not a part of the video.
*laughing*
[voice] Hi and welcome to our tutorial.
[voice] In this video, we will show you how to create identities through the quick star
wizard.
*trumpet playing*, *yelling*
*energetic brass instrumental music*
*applause*
constantdull: Yeah, thank you very much.
*applause*
So, yeah, if there's questions, I would just like to say, at the end of the project
I'll also release like a.. of course, like the
cool little graphs that you see
when you hit the BBC how many profiles were deleted by Facebook, and how,
and like.. and you'll see like how many little like attacks sparked which..
how many deletions, and these kind of things.
But, again, if you could help me have these fake identities
infiltrate the real world with the real identities and let them
mash up together, I would be very grateful for this project.
Herald: I would also like to boost up my Instagram, my Twitter, my Facebook too.
constantdull: Oh, you want more followers? Herald: Yeah!
constantdull: Oh yeah, ok. Herald: Please.
10,000..
constantdull: I get that a lot.
Herald: Are we not friends? 100.000
*audience laughing*
*laughs* Thank you so much for the super-interesting talk.
We.. I think we time for 2 questions, or even 1 question from..
constantdull: Oh, but there's a big.. there's a big no on that.
constantdull: I'm.. Herald: No.
No.
So.. yeah, actually.. if there's any questions then I think
we can do that outside of the talk right now.
Thank you very much!
constantdull: Thank you! *applause*
*postroll music*